Death Overdue / Mary Lou Kirwin

3 out of 5 stars

Spunky librarian Karen Nash is back in London and planning to open a bookstore with her beau, Caldwell Perkins, who owns a B&B. Unexpectedly, Sally, Caldwell’s tall, gorgeous, and blonde ex-girlfriend shows up—possibly to reclaim the B&B—and just maybe Caldwell, too. Sally’s current boyfriend, Alfredo, joins her, and they take a room.

That night, Karen is awakened by a horrible crash. Caldwell isn’t in bed with her. She rushes out to the hall to find him standing in the doorway of the inn’s library with a look of horror on his face. Inside the room all Karen can see is a woman’s hand sticking out from under a massive pile of pages and wood. While Sally’s death appears an accident, Karen finds it hard to believe. How did the heavy oak bookshelf topple over? Karen fears Sally has been murdered. The detective on the case comes to the same conclusion and decides Caldwell is the most likely suspect.

In order to save her boyfriend, Karen must figure out what Sally was looking for in the library and what Caldwell was doing up in the middle of the night. A story of intrigue and revenge, Death Overdue is a page-turning mystery featuring a loveable heroine who loves books almost as much as she loves her man.

While this is a good cozy mystery, it really doesn’t live up to the charm of the first volume. Perhaps part of the problem is that Karen and Caldwell seem to have settled in as a couple, removing that source of tension from the plot. Add to that the fact that this plot seems to be a mere inversion of the plot of the previous book--in Killer Librarian, it was Karen who was under suspicion of killing her ex-boyfriend, Dave the plumber. This time around, Caldwell’s former woman pops back up in their B&B, accompanied by her Italian fiance, and ends up dead under a tipped-over bookcase.

Kirwin gives a tip of the hat to Agatha Christie, as she has Karen assemble all those involved in a Poirot-like reveal at the end of the book, but there is little time given to the book-love that brought Karen to London in the first place and cemented her relationship with Caldwell. The first volume also was somewhat amusing, with Karen’s pursuit of her cheating ex and a pair of eccentric sisters also staying in the B&B. That humour was missing from this volume and it suffered a bit from that lack.

I have to also say that although Karen & Caldwell are sharing a bed and are considering spending life together, the reader never observes them do more than kiss. Not that it’s necessary, but I just found it odd that their physical relationship received such short shrift.

Cozy mysteries really aren’t my thing--I prefer darker mysteries, preferably with forensics involved. I am always willing, however, to read a book featuring a library or librarian, so I had to give it a try. Although I can see where there is potential for future volumes involving Karen Nash, I am also unsurprised that there hasn’t been another volume published since 2013.

Hard Magic / Laura Anne Gilman

3 out of 5 stars

Welcome to P.U.P.I.—Private, Unaffiliated, Paranormal Investigations

A handpicked team trained to solve crimes the regular police can't touch—crimes of magic.

My name's Bonnie Torres. Recent college grad, magic user and severely unemployed. Until I got a call out of nowhere to interview for a job I hadn't applied for. It smelled fishy, but the brutal truth was I needed the work—so off I went.

Two days later I'm a PUPI—me and Nick, Sharon, Nifty and Pietr. Five twentysomethings, thrown into an entirely new career in forensic magic.

The first job we get is a doozy: proving that the deaths of two Talents were murder, not suicide. Worse, there are high-profile people who want us to close up shop and go away. We're sniffing out things they'd rather keep buried.

Looks as if this job is gonna get interesting. The only problem is, we're making it up as we go along….

I loved the basic ideas of this book--that magic would leave a signature and that a CSI-like team of people could solve crimes via their Talent. It has great potential. However, I felt like there should have been more action and less agony in this first volume. Bonita is a pretty good main character, but she does an awful lot of personal analysis (mostly about the men in her life). She desperately needs a female friend--someone to talk to so that the reader doesn’t have to listen to her inner monologue quite so often. Perhaps in the next book, but the only other female character in this one doesn’t seem to have good chemistry with Bonnie.

Still, I liked the book enough that I will look for the next volume. The trick is going to be finding it! My library doesn’t have it and I just happened to find this one at my favourite used bookshop. Looks like I will be using interlibrary loan once again.

I do think that the name of the magic community, the Cosa Nostradamus, is genius! Giving the impression of the mafia combined with magic, you realize just what the PUPI organization is up against. Add to that the mysterious Fatae, fae-like creatures, that exist in this version of New York, but haven’t been utilized to their full potential in this first volume. I do hope that they feature more prominently in future books.

Honor Bound / Rachel Caine & Ann Aguirre

4.25 stars out of 5

Zara Cole was a thief back on Earth, but she’s been recently upgraded to intergalactic fugitive. On the run after a bloody battle in a covert war that she never expected to be fighting, Zara, her co-pilot Beatriz, and their Leviathan ship Nadim barely escaped the carnage with their lives.

Now Zara and her crew of Honors need a safe haven, far from the creatures who want to annihilate them. But they’ll have to settle for the Sliver: a wild, dangerous warren of alien criminals. The secrets of the Sliver may have the power to turn the tide of the war they left behind—but in the wrong direction.

Soon Zara will have to make a choice: run from the ultimate evil—or stand and fight.

An excellent follow-up to the first book. More is revealed about the Honors universe and it’s a dark and twisty place. Perfect for an adventure for a girl from the mean streets of Earth, like Zara Cole. I am glad that there will be a third volume, as this is a great fantasy world and it would be a shame not to explore it fully. Keep on writing, Ms. Caine and Ms. Aguirre!

I would maybe rate it at 4.25 or 4.33 stars, when I gave the first book the full 5 star treatment. Some of this is undoubtedly due to my mental state these days, whirling with many different priorities. Plus I had some books for my real-life book club that needed attention right while I was in the middle of reading this. Distractions!

If you feel strongly about cliff-hangers, you may wish to wait until this series is complete, because I would have to call the ending to this volume a cliff-hanger. However, I would strongly recommend the series to readers of fantasy and science fiction--it may be classified as Young Adult, but trust me there is enough substance here to please an older adult as well. (Caine is particularly good at that, I find).

I do find myself wondering about the tendency in the science fiction genre to portray humanity as the street fighters in the universe, looked down on by extraterrestrial species for our aggression and general dangerousness. I’ve encountered this idea repeatedly, including in this series and I think that might be a bit of an exaggeration, but I guess we need to be optimistic that we could hold our own in the universe.

At any rate, this was an excellent book, with a great set-up for the next and I can hardly wait to get my hands on volume 3.

We Need To Talk About Kevin / Lionel Shriver

4 out of 5 stars

Eva never really wanted to be a mother - and certainly not the mother of the unlovable boy who murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker, and a much-adored teacher who tried to befriend him, all two days before his sixteenth birthday. Now, two years later, it is time for her to come to terms with marriage, career, family, parenthood, and Kevin's horrific rampage in a series of startlingly direct correspondences with her estranged husband, Franklin. Uneasy with the sacrifices and social demotion of motherhood from the start, Eva fears that her alarming dislike for her own son may be responsible for driving him so nihilistically off the rails.

Here I am, several days after finishing this book, trying to collect my thoughts about it into a coherent narrative. I’m also intensely aware of writing this missive on Mother’s Day. I vascillated back and forth between 3 and 4 stars, finally settling on 4 because I couldn’t quit thinking about it.

It’s an exploration of the whole nature vs. nurture argument (although surely we all realize by now that its “both and” rather than “either or”). The volume that I read had an essay by the author at the end and I was interested in her perspective:

Though any writer is pleased by admiring reviews in the Wall Street Journal or Publishers Weekly, I’ve been more fascinated by the responses to Kevin...by so-called “ordinary” readers. Not only are many of these amateur reviews surprisingly well written and reflective, but they divided almost straight down the middle into what seem to be reviews of two different books….Mission accomplished.”

I believe that I read somewhere that nature (genetics) loads the gun, but nurture (environment) pulls the trigger. To me, it seems that Kevin shares a genetic tendency with his mother towards being restless and bored. Eva solved it first by traveling and second by childbirth, her son by murder. Both are competitive in their own arenas. With a different mother, Kevin might have turned out differently. Maybe. But we see from Eva’s relationship with Celia that she is capable of being a good mother, given a child who will meet her halfway. Every time you think you know for sure what went wrong, Shriver produces an event like a rabbit out of a hat to show you that it ain’t necessarily so.

I really enjoy epistolary novels, so that was a point in its favour for me. I also appreciated how carefully the author doled out the bread crumbs, leading the reader on, gradually revealing the true situation. Or at least what Eva believes the true situation to be. It seems to me that the two camps of readers (That poor woman vs. the woman who ruined her son’s life) show us clearly the stresses of parenting in the modern world. It’s still the mother who is saddled with the expectations for her children, as if the father’s job was over when sperm joined egg. Mothers aren’t allowed to be human or have imperfections. I think that’s what people are referring to when they call this a feminist novel--why is it the mother or why is it only the mother who is deemed at fault? Because all the way through the novel, I found myself asking, “What the hell is wrong with Franklin? Why can he not see any of this?” I also found myself wondering what had drawn Eva and Franklin together to begin with and why they stayed together.

I could write a thesis on this book. It makes me think of so many things, join so many disparate threads together. So although I may not have enjoyed the book in the traditional sense, I can’t quite get it out of my head. The impulse was to sit right back down and read it again. Maybe I will revisit it in the future, who knows? May I say that I am profoundly happy to be single and childless.

On Basilisk Station / David Weber

3 out of 5 stars

Honor Harrington in trouble: Having made him look the fool, she's been exiled to Basilisk Station in disgrace and set up for ruin by a superior who hates her. Her demoralized crew blames her for their ship's humiliating posting to an out-of-the-way picket station. The aborigines of the system's only habitable planet are smoking homicide-inducing hallucinogens. Parliament isn't sure it wants to keep the place; the major local industry is smuggling, the merchant cartels want her head; the star-conquering, so-called "Republic" of Haven is Up to Something; and Honor Harrington has a single, over-age light cruiser with an armament that doesn't work to police the entire star system.

But the people out to get her have made one mistake.

They've made her mad!

Honor Harrington—a very obviously virtuous name for a woman who is going to be all about her own personal integrity. I liked Honor as a character because Weber depicts her as a strong, decisive leader. Mind you, he throws in a few stereotypes as well—she’s “not good at math,” she has striking good looks but thinks she’s lumpy and unattractive, and she’s single, so she has to have a cat (because we single women are always just steps away from being crazy cat ladies). Nevertheless, if anyone can make lemonade out of the lemons that life handed her, it’s Honor.

There’s lots of good action, but Weber could take some lessons from Lois McMaster Bujold and her Vorkosigan series on how to keep the plot flowing. (I found quite a few similarities in how talented both Miles Vokosign and Honor Harrington are). Unfortunately, OBS has pages and pages of different commanders going on and on about what they were going to do plus how and why they were going to do it. *Yawn!* Also, during the final, dramatic space chase, there were more pages and pages devoted to the history of hyperdrive. Really? In the middle of the supposedly high stakes chase? Dude, I’m glad you thought about these things, they’re great background info for you as author, but why are you dumping them on your readers? I almost never skim and I skimmed until I found action again.

I also had to go back and re-read bits, where the space Navy and the Marines annihilate thousands of Medusan aborigines! I just couldn’t believe what I was reading and that they were completely unconcerned about repercussions of such an act. Seen through a 2019 lens, that just seems wildly out of touch. How times have changed!

Still, it was a pretty good story and I’m glad that I read it. I’m maybe not excited enough to pursue the series, however.

Book number 317 of my Science Fiction & Fantasy reading project.

Gap Into Power / Stephen R. Donaldson

3.5 out of 5 stars

The stage is set of confrontation at Billingate--illegal shipyard, haven for pirates and brigands, where every vice flourishes and every appetite can be sated.  Gateway to the alien realm of the Amnion, the shipyard is a clearinghouse for all they require to fulfill their mutagenic plans against humanity.

It is here that the fate of Morn Hyland is to be decided amid a kaleidoscopic whirl of plot and counterplot, treachery and betrayal.

As schemes unravel to reveal yet deeper designs, Morn, Nick, Angus' lives may all be forfeit as pawns in the titanic game played our between Warden Dios, dedicated director of the UMC Police, and the Dragon, greed-driven ruler of the UMC.  Here, the future of humankind hangs on the uncertain fortune of Morn Hyland in a daring novel of epic power and suspense, relentlessly gripping from first page to last.

I have made no secret of the fact that I struggle with Stephen Donaldson’s writing. This is the only series of his that I have made any connection with, and my relationship to it is turbulent. I’m not one of those people who needs to like the characters in order to like the book, but it helps if I care what happens to them. I reluctantly care about what happens to the main characters in the Gap series.

Its like Donaldson took the Star Trek universe and turned it inside out. There is no Prime Directive, no Starfleet, no honourable oversight by basically good-intentioned people. Like in C.J. Cherryh’s Company Wars series, it is the giant corporation that controls space and with the United Mining Companies comes the shadowy director, also known as the Dragon, who seeks to control everything.

In many ways, this is a bleaker, darker version of Cherryh’s idea of the megacorporation running outer space, like Glen Cook’s The Black Company running the universe. I had to order this volume through interlibrary loan, but I’ve got the remaining books from the local used book store, so finishing the series is a very likely proposition.

Book number 316 in my Science Fiction & Fantasy reading project.

Troubles / J.G. Farrell

3.5 out of 5 stars

1919: After surviving the Great War, Major Brendan Archer makes his way to Ireland, hoping to discover whether he is indeed betrothed to Angela Spencer, whose Anglo-Irish family owns the once-aptly-named Majestic Hotel in Kilnalough. But his fiancée is strangely altered and her family's fortunes have suffered a spectacular decline. The hotel's hundreds of rooms are disintegrating on a grand scale; its few remaining guests thrive on rumors and games of whist; herds of cats have taken over the Imperial Bar and the upper stories; bamboo shoots threaten the foundations; and piglets frolic in the squash court. Meanwhile, the Major is captivated by the beautiful and bitter Sarah Devlin. As housekeeping disasters force him from room to room, outside the order of the British Empire also totters: there is unrest in the East, and in Ireland itself the mounting violence of "the troubles."

I wasn’t in a head space to properly appreciate this book. Whenever I would pick it up, I could read along quite happily. However, when I set it down it was always an effort to pick it back up. What can I say, life is complicated right now. I’m in the process of retirement, which takes more energy than I thought it would. We’ve been having mail issues and water issues at my condo complex. I’ve spent time cat-sitting for my cousin and have been away from home (thankfully during most of the water issues). I’m preparing for a trip to France. The washer in my building is out of order and I desperately need to do laundry. And do you know, when you announce that you’re retiring, you suddenly get coffee & lunch dates galore!

So, I’m easily distracted by shiny objects right now, and this book deserves more attention than I was able to give it. It’s a shame that the author died as young as he did, because I have a feeling that he would have produced more & better.

There were so many details that amused me—the colony of cats inhabiting one of the bars (and the abortive attempt to get rid of them later), the plethora of dogs also roaming the hotel premises, the overgrown palm garden room requiring a machete from time to time. Mostly the complete benign neglect with which the Majestic Hotel was just allowed to fall to pieces bit by bit.

The hotel seemed to represent the British Empire—something old, decrepit, and bordering on useless. The Irish weather was gradually tearing it down, just as the IRA was gradually wearing down the British attempts to rule in Ireland. Its owner, Edward Spencer, guards his statue of Queen Victoria, looks down his nose at his Irish neighbours, and fights a losing battle against Irish Republicanism. Major Brendan Archer, who came to the Majestic to sort out a possible engagement to Edward’s daughter, Angela, finds himself trying to temper Spencer’s behaviour and to encourage him to pay more attention to the hotel’s structure. The novel recounts the troubles experienced by the denizens of the Majestic, which mirror the Troubles between England and Ireland—was ever a conflict so misnamed? Troubles sounds minor, but this conflict was anything but.

Everyone has mixed emotions and divided loyalties. There’s no happy solution to anything. There are some amusements along the way, but I found this to be a very sad book, not that there could have been any other conclusion.

Vurt / Jeff Noon

3.5 stars out of 5

Vurt is a feather--a drug, a dimension, a dream state, a virtual reality. It comes in many colors: legal Blues for lullaby dreams. Blacks, filled with tenderness and pain, just beyond the law. Pink Pornovurts, doorways to bliss. Silver feathers for techies who know how to remix colors and open new dimensions. And Yellows--the feathers from which there is no escape.

The beautiful young Desdemona is trapped in Curious Yellow, the ultimate Metavurt, a feather few have ever seen and fewer still have dared ingest. Her brother Scribble will risk everything to rescue his beloved sister. Helped by his gang, the Stash Riders, hindered by shadowcops, robos, rock and roll dogmen, and his own dread, Scribble searches along the edges of civilization for a feather that, if it exists at all, must be bought with the one thing no sane person would willingly give.

Well, if most cyberpunk were more like this, I would be more enthusiastic about it. This was fun. And it reminded me of so many other books that I have read during my Science Fiction & Fantasy project. Like A Clockwork Orange, oh my brothers! I also kept thinking about Gravity's Rainbow, just because of the way things flowed and characters entered and exited, only to return at odd moments. But mostly, it was like going Through the Looking Glass with Alice, where Alice is actually Philip K. Dick. I absolutely loved it when Scribb showed up at a club called the Slivey Tove and there was a White Rabbit doorman. That was when my Lewis Carroll suspicions were confirmed. And the dogmen made me think of The Island of Doctor Moreau (and in Ben Aaronovitch’s Peter Grant series, what they called the Stripclub of Dr Moreau).

The layers of reality were both confusing and intriguing--just trying to keep track of where Scribb was could be challenging. (Just like the Queen of Hearts said, you have to run as fast as you can just to stay in one place).

I haven’t had much luck locating the other two volumes (Pollen andAutomated Alice), but I intend to keep searching for them.

Book 315 in my Science Fiction and Fantasy Reading Project.

The Dame Was Trouble / edited by Sarah L. Johnson

4 out of 5 stars

A collection of Canadian Crime Fiction from the best and brightest female crime writers that the Great White North has to offer. From noir to hardboiled, and thriller to cozy mystery, these Dames know how to tell tales to thrill, chill and KILL.


There is nothing like a dame.

Especially when she’s running her own life, marching to her own tune, doing her own thing.

Great detective stories, almost all of which I really enjoyed. There were two that I felt a bit “meh” about, but by and large they were very entertaining. I especially enjoyed reading stories set in my own country. And populated by women who aren’t the slightest bit hesitant about supporting themselves and running their own lives.

Sisters are doin’ it for themselves! Plus, most excellent cover art.